The Golden Wrench

A blog about bicycle repair and maintenance by the mechanics at Freewheel Bike.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Headshok upgrade double-header!

Shockspital-West Bank got a pair of Headshok Fatty Ultra forks in the other day, so Troy (from WB) and Tyson (from Shockspital's Midtown HQ) teamed up to get 'em running like new.

Unfortunately, both dampers were damaged to the point that they would no longer hold oil, even with fresh seals. Lucky for us (and the customer!), Cannondale offers a damper exchange program (with certain restrictions) that makes replacing the entire damper a financially viable option. Here's the guts of the old DLR80 damper:

As is typical with this type of failure, damper oil had run down through the bearings and completely flushed out all the grease. In these cases we like to do a full service on the telescope to get everything clean before applying fresh grease. Here's the telescope all taken apart:

When the protective boot covering the telescope gets saturated with damper oil it tends to harden up and crack, so we replace that, as well:

Here you can see the needle bearing retainers covered in grease and ready for reassembly:

Here's Troy coaxing the race retaining clip back into place:

...and in goes the brand-new damper....

....and the knobs go back on and we're done!

Both forks now have an up-to-date DLR damper (with new one-year warranty) and smooth bearings. Like new. Nice!

2 comments:

Unfortunately there's not much we can do with an old DD50--the cartridge thread pitch is not compatible with current dampers and we've long since run out of replacement elastomers. Your best bet is probably a fork exchange, which you can do through us or your local Cannondale dealer.